THE ORDER (2024) is a gritty, not too showy but completely riveting true crime movie about neo-nazi bank robbers in the Pacific Northwest, circa 1983. The protagonist is an FBI agent, but one of his specialties is going after bigots, and I support him in that. Anyway it’s kinda like DEAD BANG – he’s a total mess, and he’s pretty much all we got against these guys.

Terry Husk (Jude Law [EXISTENZ] playing a fictional character only a little bit based on the actual lead agent of the case) shows up in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho to reopen an abandoned field office. Sheriff Loftlin (Philip Granger, also the sheriff in JUGGERNAUT, TUCKER AND DALE VS. EVIL, SECRET LIVES, and LITTLE BROTHER OF WAR) kinda laughs at him for coming to what he considers a quiet farm town, and tries to steer him away when he asks about some white power flyers he saw, and if they’re related to the local white nationalist preacher, Richard Butler (Victor Slezak, ABDUCTION). From his reaction I assumed the sheriff was one of the racists, but we later find out it’s that other cop thing: he’s just an idiot who doesn’t recognize the threat. “It’s just talk” is what he says. “They mostly keep to themselves.”

Luckily young officer Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan, THE CARD COUNTER) overhears and gives Terry directions to the Aryan Nations compound over in Hayden Lake. Jamie seems to be glad a fed is interested in those guys, so he takes the chance of crossing his boss and trying to play dumb about it. Yeah, he’s newer, younger, and his wife Kimmy (Morgan Holmstrom) isn’t white, but he cares for a different reason. A guy he grew up with named Walter (Daniel Doheny) was in the Aryan Nations and told him they were counterfeiting money. Now he’s missing. Never came back after a hunting trip.

When they go talk to Walter’s wife Bonnie Sue (Geena Meszaros, Under the Banner of Heaven) they do a good cop/bad cop thing, but only because it’s their actual personalities. Terry makes her cry and Jamie walks her across the yard and talks to her like an old friend.

But they find her husband in a shallow grave. There’s a powerful jump cut from the murder scene after they found it to hours later when the sky is darker and a bunch of different agencies have joined them. The sheriff gets to be there to witness the FBI claiming jurisdiction and Terry taking Jamie with him on the murder investigation.

Jamie thinks the same guys are involved in a synagogue bombing and some bank robberies. Terry doesn’t think robberies fit the profile of neo-nazis, but his agent friend Joanne Carney (Jurnee Smollett, ROLL BOUNCE) looks into it and does find out there was a dud bomb found in a porn shop near a bank that was robbed in Spokane. That’s weird. These guys are weird.

They go to Aryan Nations and talk to Butler about the guys who took Walter hunting. He says he kicked them out. The infamous white supremacist leader distances himself from these people for being too extreme, or at least too openly extreme. There’s a big scene where Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult, CLASH OF THE TITANS) interrupts Butler’s sermon in church to interject his own opinion. Butler tries to just play it cool and let him get it out of his system; little does he know Bob will roll into a rousing speech about the poor white man and get the whole congregation chanting. He’s got that cult or gang leader charisma, so he peels off some congregants for his radical splinter group that’s stealing money to buy guns to start a race war.

Throughout the investigation they keep finding copies of The Turner Diaries, a 1978 white supremacist novel about a race war, now famous as a favorite of Timothy McVeigh. (He claimed not to agree with its racism, but sold the book at gun shows and had pages with highlighted portions in his car during the bombing.) The book has a faction in it called The Order and preaches violent racist revolution and ethnic cleansing. Bob reads it to his kid as a bedtime story.

He styles himself as a disciplined, wholesome family man as he goes between his wife Debbie (Alison Oliver, SALTBURN) and his pregnant girlfriend Zillah (Odessa Young, THE DAMNED). They both have that aura of some poor lady who puts up with too much shit from her man, but also fuck these women, they know what he believes.

That’s part of why Joanne is a great supporting character. She’s generally more professional than Terry, and exasperated by his methods, but when they search a compound and she sees all the racist shit on the wall she loses all patience for anyone willing to have anything to do with these people. They’re questioning Debbie at home, Joanne smacks her head against a table and calls her a “dumb nazi bitch.” It’s really effective because you totally get it but also she’s fuckin up, she shouldn’t be doing that.

She and Terry are obviously close, been through some shit together, she seems concerned about him, but sort of powerless to help him. He says the wife and kid will be moving there soon, but she notices he’s living like a total burnout in a barren rathole. (Don’t worry, they don’t get together. It’s not like that. It’s maybe deeper than that.)

This is a police procedural, with clues, breaks, an informant, and ominous driving-to-go-do-some-perilous-shit shots that reminded me of SICARIO. There is the adrenaline rush and stomach-tightening tension of bank robberies, chases and other explosions of violence in broad daylight. And it’s weird to hear more about some true crime stuff I was partly aware of but find out it happened closer to me than I realized. Mathews’ cabin was on Whidbey Island, and a police chase scene ends up in the parking lot of Northgate Mall. It’s filmed in Alberta and the real mall doesn’t really exist in the same way anyway, but I thought the location they chose wasn’t a terrible facsimile. It had some parallels.

The Order are the guys who assassinated talk radio host Alan Berg, as seen in Oliver Stone’s TALK RADIO. He’s played here by Marc Maron. It’s interesting that he signs off with sympathy and optimism for his anti-semitic callers, saying “I think people are actually decent. That’s why they call in. That’s why they want to talk. They want someone to connect with.” He says “I think our better instincts will prevail.” They follow him home and shoot him with an uzi.

Clearly these guys are out of control, and like any true story about bank robbers and murderers the noose is tightening on them, there’s a sense of approaching doom, of knowing vaguely how this is gonna end (with a stand-off). And bad things happen to good people, too, including one of the most “oh shit, that must be what it’s really like” bleeding out scenes I’ve seen in a while. But the most haunting part of it for me is not the pointless deaths, but the disgusting feeling that after losing at the time these assholes ended up winning in the long run. When Butler is trying to talk Bob down he says, “We seek the same goals. In ten years, we’ll have members in the Congress, the Senate — that is how you make change, but progress takes time.” When he died in 2004, Aryan Nations only had about 200 members, and he’d lost his compound to a lawsuit over a hate crime (though a fellow racist millionaire gave him a new house). Even as their mimeographed pamphlets became wider-reaching websights the white supremacist groups were scattered, fringe weirdos, seemingly on the brink of extinction.

If Richard Butler were alive today, do you doubt he could be in Trump’s cabinet? He and his billionaire internet nazi raised in apartheid South Africa are illegally firing as many Black people, women and gays as they can find in leadership, deleting any program or document that ever used words related to diversity or inequality, inventing sick new ways to oppress and humiliate trans people, and rounding up immigrants to put in Guantanamo. Musk, Trump, Stephen Miller and many of their stooges openly espouse white nationalist ideology, “jokingly” do nazi salutes, and repeat the “white genocide” myths taught to neo-nazis by The Turner Diaries. They’re living Bob Mathews’ dream without having to shoot at armored cars or (so far) hang people – they just had to spout enough KKK anti-immigrant horseshit to get barely enough votes to get in there and dare anyone to stop them from systematically dismantling all our institutions, transferring all our money to themselves, crashing planes into each other and blaming it on Black people. As their pardoned insurrectionists stand back and stand by any Terry or Joanne who hasn’t already been fired from the FBI will be re-directed by their right wing charlatan bosses who barely even pretend to be there for any reason other than corruption and political persecution.

Shortly after the election, THE ORDER producer Stuart Ford (DEAD MAN DOWN, THE RHYTHM SECTION) told Variety that “When we came to sell the film (before its Venice launch) there were some distributors who were outwardly nervous that its subject matter was divisive from a Red State/Blue State perspective.” In Variety’s words, the movie “has not been an easy sell amid the current Trumpian zeitgeist.” So that’s where we are. A true story about neo-nazi terrorists trying to start a race war might be seen as criticism of Republicans. Man, we’re in trouble.

But if you’re willing to sink into the gloom for a bit, THE ORDER is a great movie, well directed, understated but thrilling at times, with really good performances. Law goes pretty big, he’s doing his FRENCH CONNECTION or something, and his accent isn’t always authentic, but I like that kind of performance. There’s a scene where he’s beating up a prisoner and then gets embarrassed because his nose starts bleeding on the guy. He’s a walking catastrophe. It seems to be saying that there are people out there trying to fight for the right thing but basically it eats them up inside and runs over their hollow husks with a steamroller. But hopefully some of them get back up.

There was a 1999 Showtime movie about The Order called BROTHERHOOD OF MURDER, with Peter Gallagher as Mathews. It doesn’t have great reviews, but it’s directed by Martin Bell (STREETWISE, AMERICAN HEART) and written by Robert J. Avrech (BODY DOUBLE), so who knows, maybe worth watching? But I’m sure it’s not as good as this one, which comes from Australian director Justin Kurzel (SNOWTOWN, TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG), and is written by Zach Baylin (KING RICHARD, CREED III, THE CROW), from the book The Silent Brotherhood by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt.